Portable media players have been provided on the market for decades. Portable radio receivers for tuning in to broadcast radio transmissions have been available for many decades. The portable cassette player became popular in the late 1970:s, whereas portable CD and MD players took over the market at the later part of the 20th century. Today, the physical media carrier is becoming more and more rare, and media is commonly stored and shared in the shape of media files. For audio mp3 is an MPEG format which is often used, particularly for music, and there are also MPEG formats used for video. An electronic device configured to read a media file and convert it to a perceivable signal, such as sound or images, will simply be referred to herein as a media player.
The common way of operating portable media players is to incorporate some form of re-writable memory, such as an insertable memory card or a built-in memory connectable to a computer for downloading media files. The memory size of the media player then determines e.g. how many music tracks that can be stored, together with the fact that higher quality files generally are larger in terms of required memory space.
In addition to live broadcast transmissions and locally stored media, another way of receiving media has become popular, and that is streaming media. Streaming media is media that is consumed, i.e. read, heard, viewed, while it is being delivered. Streaming is more a property of the delivery system than the media itself. The distinction is usually applied to media that are distributed over computer networks or radio communications networks such as 3G mobile networks.
The benefit of having many different ways of accessing media also creates problems, since ease of use for the end consumer is a crucial objective. Its is common practice today to create playlists for stored media files, and also channel lists for receivable broadcast or streamed media channels. However, to combine different sources of information, and to process media received signals, is no easy task. Nor is it straightforward for the end consumer how to operate the wireless device to select channels and types of media transmission for accessing media.